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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Stop whining about your parents. You are an adult. You made choices. Unless you were seriously abused, stop stop stop stop stop blaming your parents for your life choices. It’s insane. I’m so sick of people doing this. You have hard YEARS to find mentorship. To change careers. You went to an IVY LEAGUE college. What more do you want? What could they have done more than they did? Stop looking around at everyone else’ paper. I felt empathy when this thread started. Now I think you need some jolt of reality.

News flash: education is only one aspect toward success. Ivy League degrees do not predict future wealth. Your ego is your problem. You think you deserve more than you have acquired. You don’t. Just get the hell over yourselves. [/quote]

I am incredibly sad if I came across as whining about my parents.  They really lifted me up and helped me achieve my dream: to get to that fancy college and out of my rural small town.  The sacrificed to make that happen and certainly supported me.

Even now as an adult I still have no idea how to find mentorships (and I'm so old I need to be the mentor honestly, and I am to some of younger staff), maybe something about the way I look or talk is off putting in a way I'm unaware -- but despite working had and always having good reviews, no one has ever been in a position that I felt I could ask them for that kind of relationship, nor anyone made any hints at helping me advance my career in ANY WAY.  I think the positions I ended up in were always on the periphery in some way...

Actually, once I had kids, I spent a DECADE trying to change careers.  I have no idea why it never came to pass (offers that were lower than I make now, or just ghosted after the final interview) but I think just the mix of market timing (tech wasn't really ascendent after the dot.com crash until I was a decade into gov work and well over 30).  I maybe could have gotten an MBA and tried to get into finance, but I KNOW I would have just gone for some local MBA not understanding how its top 10 MBA or bust (according to DCUM).

I like the idea of an ego being the problem, but what I really am dealing with is regret and shame -- I wasted this amazing opportunity and I can't even figure out how.  I would feel a lot better if I instead partied at college, really didn't give a darn, and was happy pulling an "Office Space" Peter Gibbons -- instead I'm having the middle age version of "Booksmart" angst!!

To be completely honest, except for the fact my moving for college meant I met my amazing DW, I think I would have ended up much happier going to my local state flagship, getting some professional job in a city like Tusla, and living at the top of my smaller world.  And I wouldn't have taken my Ivy spot from someone who was actually going to do something great in the world...[/quote]

Or you can consider altering your very limited ideas about the purpose of your education.
While I share your wish that I had had help navigating and effectively utilizing more of the resources that were available to me,[b] I realize that my very presence as a student in my college was revolutionary— in many ways that I did not realize at the time.  I tried new things, learned a lot, made lifelong friends, and successfully jumped the next set of academic and career hurdles that I faced.  I wasn’t “prepared” the way the Prep school kids and the legacy kids were.  I did, however, do the best I could with what I had to work with, and I “swam” even as others sank.  I have done great things in the world — even though they have been small great things rather than larger or flashier ones. [/b] I’m wondering if some cognitive restructuring might encourage you to not necessarily see your educational experiences differently but to VALUE them differently.  And, you know that your own experiences may be making many things exponentially easier and more available for your kids.

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NP here. Do you mind talking more about this and being more specific? I am in a similar situation as the OP and have severe clinical depression because of it. I find your comment vague and insensitive -- being in the position I am now ($125k in a non-glamorous career) is embarrassing. I don't consider that "swimming" at all. [/quote]

I’m not sure which part you’d like me to say more about.  Since you brought up your salary and “glamour “, I’ll start with that. I’ll also state upfront that there’s no need for your values to in any way resemble mine — but it might be helpful to look deeply at your own values and how they may have changed, because you may well be a smashing success by your own standards if you can manage to stop moving the goalposts. 
I’ll add too, that it’s not my intention to be insensitive, or to pretend that anything that I could say here could impact someone’s clinical depression.  
  I guess the simplest thing I can say is how important it has been for me to reframe how I look at my accomplishments.  It’s also important for me to compare myself with my own goals and progress, particularly if I’m going to also compare my accomplishments with someone else’s.

I went into a completely foreign environment — and made good friends, made good grades, accomplished significant academic goals, and used those things to get a job that was a good fit with prestigious employer.  I accomplished those things despite difficult and even traumatic circumstances. Those are multiple data points that are worthy of acknowledgment and even celebration.  I’m not going to overlook those things and only focus on comparing my salary with someone else who had a completely different set of advantages and struggles, and a completely different set of goals.

I got what I wanted, and succeeded by some measures, against enormous odds. I’m not going to stop seeing that. “I exceeded my ancestors’ wildest expectations “.  That doesn’t keep me from setting new goals or making choices that I hope will give me more money, or more time, or more flexibility, or more security or even more joy. But I will do that knowing that I used my talents as well as I could given what I originally had to work with.

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